Late Night Talks
by Masquerading as Quality
Summary: For some time, they convinced themselves that what they missed most about one another was the sex. But when they lay alone at night, or awake long after a new lover had gone to sleep, they found that what they really missed were those odd, whispered conversations on subjects they'd never dared broach before, and had scarcely touched since. [Dragon Queen, series of one-shots.]
1. Family

**A/N:** A series of (probably, relatively) short late night conversations, based on prompts or my own musings. Not sure how many there will be. Will probably be vaguely continuity-compliant with one another, but I ignore a lot of OUAT canon for my own sanity. Enjoy!

* * *

 **I - Family**

They're lying awake sometime late at night, or perhaps very early in the morning, sprawled out on their backs a short distance of hot, sweaty sheets apart, hands still clasped—hesitantly despite what has transpired between them.

"Do you think…" Regina begins, but she chokes on her words. She spoke very quietly, her voice barely louder than the crashing of the waves below the fortress, and maybe Maleficent is already half-asleep and didn't hear.

A moment passes in silence and Maleficent asks her, "What?"

Unconsciously, Regina's fingers tighten around Maleficent's hand. She feels sick to her stomach. She doesn't know how she could have possibly allowed this treacherous thought to surface. "Do you think…you'll ever have a family?"

She expects Maleficent to scoff, perhaps even laugh at her. But Maleficent remains silent for a long time before she responds. "It seems unlikely," she says, slowly, and there's something strange in her voice. "Certainly not in the traditional sense, if it is ever to be," she continues, with an attempt at lightness of tone that is entirely futile.

Regina closes her eyes, breathes in and out in time with the crashing of the waves below them, and when she speaks she feels as though her voice has left her body. "I think a part of me wants it more than anything else," she says. "But another part of me…the much larger part…fears I'll just make the same mistakes my parents did. I cannot bear to think of my childhood as inevitable."

Maleficent turns to face her. Regina doesn't see it so much as she hears the rustling of sheets and feels the movement of the bed. She feels far away, not fully present. She's speaking nonsense—she is married to the King now. The only freedom for her now will be in death. She is infertile—a bittersweet blessing. Even if she weren't under lock and key she couldn't simply find someone new and start a family.

"Of course it isn't inevitable, Regina," says Maleficent. "Nothing is."

Regina adores Maleficent just a bit more in this moment for playing along with her nonsense. She still feels detached from her body, but with foreign, shaking limbs, she reaches for Maleficent's arms and enfolds herself within them, wills Maleficent to hold her tighter, tighter, until she can feel the pressure against her skin.

"Tell me what it would be like," she entreats against the skin of Maleficent's neck. She feels Maleficent tense beneath her hands, but she does not withdraw, and after another moment of quiet contemplation, Maleficent, somewhat awkwardly, attempts to honour her request.

"Well, I…suppose you'd want two children or so," she begins. "You'll make a profoundly neurotic new mother, to be certain. Fuss over everything, every minute detail. But with the second one you'll have learned to relax a bit. They'll be…they'll be happy, Regina. So happy, perhaps, that it will frustrate you at times. Or move you to tears. They'll be naive, in a way, for they will never have suffered the cruelty you have known."

Maleficent's fingers comb through Regina's hair, and Regina realized vaguely that she has begun to cry, but she makes no attempt to stop or conceal it.

"And they'll love you, Regina," says Maleficent, as sweetly and as gently as she has ever said anything. "They won't always like you, but they'll love you. And they'll never for one instant doubt that you love them."

Regina's fingernails dig into the skin of Maleficent's back. She's heaving shallow breaths as hot tears pour down her face. It can never be, what Maleficent is saying, and yet Regina wants it with all her heart.

"I want it so—so _badly_ , Maleficent," she weeps, voice reduced to little more than a hoarse whisper. "I feel—I feel as though my heart is being—being ripped from my body, for how I ache for what cannot be…"

And none of it can be. She will never be free. She will never have a family of her own. They will never even have the chance to be happy or to love her, because they will never, ever exist.

Maleficent holds her in solemn silence, smoothes her hair and traces soothing magic all over her body until Regina has cried herself out and fallen into that hazy state between wakefulness and sleep where everything seems a bit softer, a bit easier to believe. She places lazy, half-conscious kisses on Maleficent's shoulder and along her sharp collarbone, nestles her head beneath Maleficent's chin.

The last thing she hears before she drifts into a merciful and dreamless slumber is Maleficent's voice, cool and gentle as the ebb and flow of the ocean. "Nothing is inevitable, Regina."


	2. Fear

**II - Fear**

Maleficent sits bathed in bright moonlight in the middle of Regina's sitting room floor, despondent and trembling.

"Maleficent?" Regina tries, but she knows there will be no response. She's seen Maleficent this way once before, long ago, back when their love was new. She didn't understand then—couldn't, even despite her own troubles. They were such similar creatures, yet handled their suffering in such profoundly disparate ways.

Regina crouches uncomfortably and settles herself on the ground next to Maleficent. There's something about sitting on the floor that has always been utterly foreign to her, one of those ignoble or unladylike practices she'd never thought to fight consciously. Mostly she realizes she only finds herself at ground level when she has fallen, literally or figuratively.

There's a distant, glazed look in Maleficent's icy blue eyes, and a thin sheen of tears covers the surface of them. She never cries, but in this moment, it seems she is so far removed from herself that her body has acted of its own accord.

Regina reaches out with agonizing slowness and places her hand lightly atop Maleficent's forearm. Maleficent starts violently and seems to cave in on herself just a fraction, but she does not withdraw. She allows Regina's hand to remain, squeezes her eyes closed and takes a deep, shuddering breath.

"I feel..." she begins, the words a mere echo of the usual piercing clarity of her voice. It's something she learned, Regina realizes, to try to put her emotions into words that others can understand. She never used to do this, to attempt to allow another person to understand her.

"Solid," she continues. "Finite. Heavy?" Her brow furrows slightly. "Trapped," she breathes, and it might as well have been the gentle night breeze that spoke.

Regina struggles to make sense of the words, for some of them seem to be wholly unrelated to others. "Has something happened?"

A breath of mirthless laughter escapes from Maleficent's lips. They are chapped. She hasn't had enough water to drink, or perhaps there's something burning her up on the inside. "Nothing," she says. "Nothing has happened, for nothing can happen. I am nothing more than this—" she extends her arms as though to fly, reaches, reaches for nothingness, and then allows them to fall back into her lap. "Confined to this place, confined to this body." She shakes her head. "It seems I owe you my thanks, Regina." The words are cold, harsh.

"For what?" Regina asks her, anyway.

"Now I know I'd have gone a hundred times madder trapped in this body than that."

She's still not making much sense, but Regina has finally begun to piece together her fragmented musings into a semblance of a guess. "You've lost your dragon form."

The words, spoken aloud, are perhaps too much for Maleficent to bear. She seems to fold in on herself. She draws her knees up to her chest, wraps lanky arms around lanky legs and can no longer contain her trembling. It is earth-shattering to witness someone so strong looking so weak.

"Magic is different here, Maleficent," Regina tries to explain. "It's..." she falters, for she isn't entirely certain she's grasped it, herself. "Strange and foreign and fleeting," she offers. "It feels completely different than it did in our world. It will take—"

"Time!" Maleficent chokes. "Always time. Nothing but time. What is time to one who is suffocating?"

Regina is at a loss. She thinks of the way Maleficent looked when they met, the same distant, glassy look in her eyes, the same sense of instability about her, the way Regina felt that there was absolutely no telling how Maleficent might behave from one moment to the next. Maleficent had turned to dissociation and escapism then. What can Regina do for her now?

"Come," she says, heaving herself off the floor. "Let's get some air."

Maleficent doesn't move immediately, but she isn't entirely lost to the world. She blinks slowly, swallows drily, and moves to stand of her own accord.

It's a beautiful night. The moon hangs bright above them, just past full, and fireflies light the path before them. It's warm enough for a pleasant walk, though perhaps a bit chilly for what Regina has in mind. It's unorthodox, something that hasn't even crossed her mind since she was a teenager, but she's hoping that a healthy dose of nostalgia mixed with childish mischief may, at least momentarily, draw Maleficent out of her private hell.

There's a large pond out in the woods where people used to go to fish or swim in the summer months. Regina hasn't been since Henry stopped wanting to spend time with her, and no one seems to go now that the Curse is broken. Maleficent follows her into the woods without protest. She's deadly silent, and Regina doesn't have to look at her to know she's deep in a spiral of depressing thought.

With a kind of methodical brusqueness, Regina begins unbuttoning her nightshirt. She didn't precisely expect this to draw Maleficent so abruptly out of her reverie, but in the back of her mind she can admit that it is a deeply satisfying response.

"What on earth are you doing?" Maleficent asks, with poorly-feigned aloofness.

"Don't want to get my pajamas wet," Regina replies coolly.

She can clearly see the faint furrowing of Maleficent's brow and the sparkling of her eyes in the bright moonlight, and it only eggs her on. She pulls her nightshirt off her shoulders with unnecessary finesse before casting it aside with a little flip of her hair. She's loath to look away from Maleficent's face, so she relishes it a moment longer as she tugs (again, entirely unnecessarily) at the drawstring of her pajama pants before turning around to push them over her hips.

It's more exhilarating than she'd anticipated, standing naked in the moonlight and knowing she's being watched so rapturously. She turns back to Maleficent with a small smile. "What are you waiting for?" she asks, but Regina was never much for patience. She reaches forward to unbutton Maleficent's nightshirt (technically also Regina's), herself.

Regina pushes the nightshirt off of Maleficent's shoulders and looks up into her eyes, but Maleficent remains nothing short of dumbstruck. She's looking down at Regina like she's utterly enamoured of something or other, and Regina cannot decide whether she finds it more exciting or unnerving. Regina tugs at Maleficent's hands and pulls her closer to the water, and Maleficent follows without protest. They're a breath apart now, hovering on the edge of something dangerous, something that has gone unspoken between them for what might as well be a lifetime, and now it is Regina just as much as Maleficent who might benefit from submerging herself into cold water.

Slowly, reluctantly, Regina pulls away from Maleficent, and unlaces their fingers. She offers Maleficent a small smirk, tosses her hair as she turns, and jumps into the water with a satisfying splash.

It's cold, and it knocks the air from her lungs for a moment, but it's also glorious, Regina emerges gasping for breath and shoving wet hair out of her face, but she realizes rather suddenly that she is also laughing.

Maleficent is still standing topless on the grass, arms limp at her sides, eyes still sparkling curiously, but softer now, and never for an instant straying from Regina.

"Join me?" Regina entreats her. She feels so happy, she wants to share it. She feels somehow that if Maleficent will simply join her, she will feel happier, too. It's a simplistic and possible completely incorrect trail of thought, but Regina longs desperately for it to be true.

"Very well," says Maleficent, in another ill-performed attempt at disdain. She steps out of her pajama pants gracefully, as though balancing on one leg were the same as standing on two, eyes the water skeptically, and then dives in.

Regina waits, floating above the surface, for what seems far too long. A thought occurs to her, one she would normally discredit immediately, but Maleficent was so despondent, so troubled, what if... "Maleficent?"

This is her fault, she caused this, she caused this, this is all her fault, it's always her fault, she made all the misery in the world happen, it's all her fault—

Maleficent emerges with a resounding splash, somehow still majestic with her hair plastered to her head. Regina is reminded of the ways in which Maleficent is no mere mortal, and in the water under the moonlight like this, she looks like a siren, impossibly beautiful and impossibly deadly.

But Maleficent opens her eyes and looks up at the trees, then over to Regina, and she offers Regina a small smile of her own. "You're right," she says quietly. "I do feel a bit better."

Regina returns her smile, but only briefly. Her heart is heavy with the things she has realized over the span of an instant. "Sometimes I forget you're not a mortal," she says.

Maleficent looks up into the trees again. "Perhaps, sometimes, so do I," she replies. "Hardly anything is eternal, after all. Neither the good..." she sighs, lowers her gaze. "...nor the bad."

Maleficent dives below the surface of the water once more, and shortly thereafter, Regina joins her. This was meant to be an escape, after all, from the crushing reality that surrounds them. When they reemerge, Regina's hands fall entirely accidentally onto Maleficent's shoulders, and she's entirely unwilling to pull away. Beneath the water, she can feel Maleficent's hands on her bare waist, and this induces a shiver wholly unrelated to the temperature of the water.

 _Remember when we...?_ she wants to say, but she can't—she won't—not now. Perhaps it was a bad idea, taking Maleficent here. She didn't realize the way it would dredge up old memories. She'd only thought about cheering Maleficent up—the way she'd loved the crashing waves against the walls of her fortress, the long walks on the beach late at night, running naked into the ocean, or diving into the water as a dragon and emerging as a human.

"Thank you, Regina," says Maleficent.

"Water is...can be...transformative," says Regina.

Maleficent studies her for a moment. She doesn't hesitate, precisely, so much as she carefully considers her words. "It matters more," she says at last, "that you brought me here."

The only way to avoid kissing Maleficent in this moment is to bury her face in Maleficent's neck. Maleficent is tall and her feet can easily reach the bottom of the pond to steady them, but Regina is reeling.

"Is something the matter?" Maleficent wraps her arms tightly around Regina.

Their bodies are pressed together beneath the water, and it's more than Regina can bear. Maleficent was paralyzed by fear at the possibility that she could never regain her legendary shapeshifting ability, and Regina is afraid of, what? Complications?

It's not that, not exactly. It's more that the person she was with Maleficent isn't very similar to the person she has been for upwards of thirty years. The Evil Queen didn't smile or laugh for any reason other than someone else's misfortune. Mayor Mills didn't go skinny dipping in the middle of the night on a whim. Regina as her circle of sort-of-friends know her is quick-witted and resourceful, to be certain, but in personality she imagines she mostly comes off as bitter and jaded and perhaps a little melancholy.

"I don't think I could describe this feeling if I tried," says Regina.

Water can be transformative, it's true. Maleficent immersed herself and became more like what she is—an immortal with unfathomable power and understanding of the universe, more than perhaps she fully realizes she can be.

Regina dove in and became somehow closer to a version of herself that...not that she isn't anymore, and not that she doesn't want to be anymore...but a version of herself that she's afraid she just simply cannot be anymore.

And how is she supposed to move forward from that?


End file.
